Philosophy

The mission of FOAS is
to promote free software, open access publishing, and reproducible research in statistics.
We understand free
software to be as defined by
the Free Software
Foundation: possible to run for any purpose,
possible to inspect in source code form, and possible to modify and/or redistribute as long
as these freedoms are preserved for future users.
Open access forums for papers are, for us,
defined as those that allow free access to all readers with an
internet connection, and that invite contributions from authors
without requiring the payment of fees.

Most `open access' journals are only open to those authors
able to pay fees (often hundreds or thousands of dollars) to submit papers.
The result is scientific discourse
in which the only parties allowed to speak are those who can
pay, or who are specially waived in (e.g., due to citizenship in a developing
country).
FOAS seeks to support
forums for the publication of results in statistics that are open access
for both readers and authors. The
Journal of Statistical Software
and The R Journal are both
open access in this full sense.

Currently, the prime example of the free software we seek to support is
R, the lingua franca
of computational statistics.
The source code of R is freely available online, and possible to modify, extend and distribute
under the terms of the
GNU General Public License. The base R distribution is
also easily extensible with user-contributed packages, many thousands of
which have been added
to the Comprehensive
R Archive Network.

FOAS also advocates for reproducible research,
which entails the
publication of code and data used to reach conclusions in the
literature.
In the same spirit that requires that the results of a scientific
experiment be published alongside a description that allows another scientist
to repeat the study, so the reproducible research movement advocates for the
publication of code and data
that allows the conclusions of a study to be independently validated.
Ideally, the
code is also possible to
run on software for which the source code is available, so that
other researchers can examine the computations performed in the analysis
at any level desired. The
Journal of Statistical Software distributes code along with all of its
articles, making it a good example of a journal that fosters reproducible
research.